Description

Tipplers Tales is a 1978 album by Fairport Convention; recorded in only ten days, it was the last album the band
recorded for Vertigo. Simon Nicol later wrote

"We secured a deal with Vertigo, the one that ended up with
them paying us not to make records. It seemed a novelty, like that Marx Brothers line: "How much for you NOT to
rehearse?" "Oh, you can't afford it." We did Bonny Bunch and Tipplers Tales then didn't make the other four contracted
albums" Dave Pegg would later say

"It wasn't a great deal of money. It was about £30,000. It was the
first time we had ever made money out of music. We got like £7,000 each. It was more money than we'd ever had in our
lives. This was back in '78 and it enabled us to split up."Tipplers Tales was described by Allmusic as "not a
concept album, even though alcohol is a recurrent motif in many of the traditional numbers", but nonetheless "doing what
the band members do best -- taking some fine old traditional English jigs, reels, and traditional narratives and putting
their own distinctive folk-rock stamp on them". Following the release of Tippler's Tales, Fairport would not record for
the following seven years until the Gladys' Leap album in 1985.

Several of the traditional folk songs had
previously been recorded by A. L. Lloyd accompanied by Dave Swarbrick. The version of "John Barleycorn" here is close to
the version recorded by Traffic, as Steve Winwood had been taught the song by The Watersons. The tune is based on "Wir
Pflügen" by Johann Schultz, better known as We Plough The Fields and Scatter, an old English harvest festival hymn.